All pictures were automatically harvested from the keitai sideblog archives, the huge majority taken with my cellphone during the year 2004.

If I have met you (long enough to take a picture) in the past 12 months or so, then chances are your mug is somewhere in there (full size here if you wanna print your own poster at home).

Hence, the kanji: 友, which means ‘friend’…
For, if a few here are a bit more than friends (and a rare few are, well, complete strangers to me right now), most of these faces are the friends who made that last revolution around the Sun somewhat bearable overall. Enjoyable, even, at times.

So, thanks everybody for being you: You rock.

And have a wonderful holiday season… may you find many a bottle of high quality, triple-filtered vodka in your Christmas stocking.

For those not easily bored: Gory technical details below

This little thing was created using a wonderful open-source program called Metapixel, slightly hacked to serve my needs.
It implements the smartest tile matching algorithm I have seen of them all (and I have tried a lot this past month, believe me) based on wavelets functions computation.
I tweaked the code in order to meet my own specific requirements for this mosaic. The modified code now lets you generate a mosaic with the following:

• Less component pictures than “spots” on the matrix.
• Every picture used in the final result
• A repetition rate (i.e. the maximum number of times any picture appears in the whole mosaic) kept to the lowest possible value
• A minimum distance (configurable) between each occurrence of the same tile.

As it is, the original code (v. 0.11) would only let you get a similar result if you give it more pictures than there are spots in the final mosaic and would not include them all in the final mosaic (quite obviously).

(I’ll post the modified version as soon as I have a second to somehow make it presentable).